Author Archive for Olafur Ingthorsson

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What’s Next for the Mobile Market – after HP’s Strategy Turn?

By Olafur Ingthorsson on September 1, 2011 in Cloud Computing and Mobile Cloud Computing. 0 Comments

Just over a year ago, HP acquired Palm together with its webOS smartphone operating system and a few new smartphones. HP had some ambitious plans of leveraging its innovation culture and marketing channels to firmly establish itself as an important player in the mobile technology ecosystem.

HP discontinues developing smartphones and tablets

How times have changed. Last week, HP announced that it will discontinue operations for webOS devices, specifically the TouchPad and webOS driven smartphones. The reason is disappointing sales and low market share in a domain dominated by Apple and Google with their iOS and Android platforms.

Unfortunately for HP, its plans to become the third force, after iPhone and Android driven devices, in the smartphone arena failed miserably, even though HP’s webOS-driven TouchPad received positive critique from several analysts. Instead, HP plans on continuing developing its webOS and seek new business models including licensing.

Whether that strategy will be more successful remains to be seen. Microsoft uses the licensing model for its Windows Phone OS, included in several handsets from manufacturers like HTC, Samsung and LG. Still, Windows Phone market share is puny compared to iOS and Android. It will be interesting to see if the deal with Nokia from earlier this year will change the momentum for Windows Phone, with new Nokia smartphones running on Windows Phone. The first handsets are expected to be launched later this year.

Clearly, HP faced tougher competition than anticipated in a market that is largely driven by apps. The number of apps available for webOS is only a fraction of those for iOS and Android devices, making it difficult for buyers to choose webOS devices. The same largely applies to the troubles at RIM. The BlackBerry App World is relatively small compared to Android Market and Apple App Store.

Who will become the “third wheel” in the ecosystem?

While many analysts agree that there is definitely room for the third platform, together with iOS and Android, it’s still unclear whether that place would be filled by webOS, Windows Phone, RIM’s BlackBerry or something else.

Considering HP’s heritage as a company primarily focusing on the enterprise market, its decision of discontinuing developing smartphones and tablets may be understandable. With its dynamic changes and special traits, the consumer market is profoundly different.

However, this is something that HP clearly knew and understood when acquiring Palm in the first place, perhaps making a miscalculated decision in its effort of establishing a “mobile strategy” – admittedly a necessity for every technology vendor in today’s market. Hence, whether HP will be successful in finding a lucrative business model for its webOS platform needs to be seen, although currently it seems unlikely.

Apart from Apple and Google, it seems that Microsoft has a good position for becoming the third large player in the ecosystem, especially after its deal with Nokia, and due to its capacity and bundling options. While Apple and Google have certainly managed to do some clever bundling and integration of the mobile platforms with some of their other services such as Gmail, Microsoft can certainly do the same when it comes to Windows Phone including MS Exchange/Outlook and Office 365.

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Virtualization and Cloud Computing – as a Service

By Olafur Ingthorsson on August 29, 2011 in Cloud Computing and Virtualization. 0 Comments

A guest article from the team at Witsbits AB

Introduction

As the IT environment becomes increasingly more complex with new technologies and applications, IT administrators are searching for simplified and cost-effective means of delivery computing resources, required for employees to do their daily work. Virtualization technologies have provided an additional layer of complexity many small businesses do not understand, nor truly have the resources to deploy internally, without expensive training and dedicated personal resources. So how can small companies  (0-99 employees) truly benefit from virtualization without incurring the additional costs and training needed ?

Problem

While there are dominant providers of public cloud services, and major host providers encouraging companies to host their applications externally, there still remain many small companies with the requirement of keeping certain data within their own IT department, from small accounting and medical services firms to financial and legal departments requiring  regulatory compliance, as well as software development companies that prefer internal application testing.

Click to enlarge

Internal and private virtualization infrastructure solutions are also often preferred for reasons of security, quicker and more convenient testing of software patches and compliance to local regulations per country. An example here includes data transfers that must remain within a particular country, region and company. The compliance  and security concerns are of particular interest to  media, financial, medical, military and high security related companies, that want to keep their data internally secured.

Microsoft, Citrix and Vmware

It should also be noted, that although Microsoft, Citrix and Vmware provide feature rich functionalities and free virtualization for basic use,  these solutions require a dedicated IT administrator with virtualization expertise plus additional time / cost to install and manage the platforms, as well as provide the regularly required maintenance.

To quote an analysts and IT consultant in the US, working with small and medium sized businesses “ It is still a pain to build a virtualized infrastructure, today “.   There are over 1 million companies with  fewer then one hundred employees in US. (US census 2007)

In particular for these small businesses, infrastructure management software is too complicated.

So how does Witsbits fit into this marketplace, today ?

Witsbits provides an entry level virtualization and cloud management platform – as a service. Customers, and IT consultants that support small businesses, use Witsbits services for the management of  internal and private virtual infrastructures.

Benefits ?

Witsbits’ management platform is set up in minutes, is software maintenance free for the customer, and very simple to use via a web browser. Pricing is based on a “pay as you go” ( vRam under management) payment model. All data, applications and storage policies remain inside the company and behind the firewall.

The users log into the Witsbits console for the management of their own virtualized infrastructure, and  IT consultants use Witsbits to manage virtualized environments across multiple customer sites at much lower costs, as the web based centralized console is used for one or a multiple of dispersed physical servers running virtual machines. The traditional upgrade per number of physical servers under centralized management is not required.

The newest release of  Witsbits is scheduled for early September.

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9 reasons why VPNs are the next big IT trend

By Olafur Ingthorsson on August 23, 2011 in Cloud Computing and Cloud Security. 0 Comments

A guest article by Paul Rudo, editor at Enterprise Features

Virtual Private Networks act as a secure tunnel that safely connects the user to a remote network across a public network.

  • Thanks to VPNs and the abundance of cheap Internet bandwidth, companies no longer have to lease dedicated lines to connect 2 remote locations. Instead, they can establish a secure encrypted channel which can safely transfer data between both locations across the Internet.
  • Another common use for VPNs would be for laptop users who want to connect to corporate systems from remote networks. These can include coffee shops, airports, hotels and other places where network security might not be the most reliable. In order to gain secure access to servers on the internal network, these employees will need to install VPNs onto their laptops.

Courtesy of Mr_Tommy (Flickr)

VPNs are not a new technology. But I strongly believe that this security tool is still very under-used, and that we should soon expect to see a boom in the use of Virtual Private Networks by both companies and individuals alike.

Internet-Enabled Devices

We’re now seeing an abundance of cheap computers embedded into everyday appliances. Everything from refrigerators, to security cameras, to electric meters, to tennis shoes. Anything you can think of has already been turned into a Wi-Fi capable computer.

And when you have an explosive growth in computing devices, you’ll also have an explosive growth in the number of potential attacks. Because of their homogeneity, these electronic “appliances” can be attacked in bulk, and used to perform attacks on other systems.

Who knows? In the future, a hacker might break into your toaster and use it to sniff your traffic.

Free Wi-Fi

Today, it seems like every bus stop, coffee shop, hotel, shopping mall, and school is providing its visitors with free wireless Internet access. Now that Wi-Fi enabled portable devices are so common, these free wireless networks are a cheap way to attract customers and enhance the overall shopping experience.

Of course, these wireless networks are usually managed by minimum-wage employees with no network security experience, and they are also a hot target for hackers. In fact, it’s common for hackers to set up their own publicly accessible Wi-Fi hotspots so that they can steal sensitive information by setting up “Man-In-The-Middle” exploits.

Government Spying

Thanks to laws like the Patriot Act, we can no longer depend on the government to protect our right to privacy. In fact, most police officers will tell you that privacy is dead. There’s even currently a lot of debate over whether or not encryption keys and passwords are protected under the 5th amendment.

The current stance of law enforcement is: “If you don’t have anything to hide, then you won’t mind if we snoop around. And don’t videotape the police.”

Since you can’t trust the government to protect your privacy, you have to take extra steps to protect yourself.

Wireless Is The Default

These days, it’s rare to see a home with wired Internet. Almost everyone relies primarily on wireless routers to distribute connectivity throughout their households and offices. Of course, these home routers are rarely secured using adequate precautions. So “war driving” has become a hot trend within the hacking community in recent years. Even within your own home, you need to encrypt all of your online activities.

Mobile Computing

Today, it’s common for most people to work on at least 2 or 3 different computers as part of their daily routine. They’ll work on their laptop at home, they’ll use a tablet when on the road, and they’ll work on their office PC when at work. And often, these various computers will all be accessing the same resources. It’s absolutely vital that all devices – including mobile devices, laptops and desktops – be secured while sending data over the Internet. A breach on your home laptop could potentially affect you when you get to your workplace desktop machine.

The Cloud

Thanks to SaaS and IaaS, the internal office network is quickly becoming a dying animal. Soon, the Internet will be the primary network for nearly every small company. Enterprise systems will be hosted on remote cloud servers, and employees will work from Software-as-a-Service applications. This means that network security will become much more difficult and much more important.

Censorship

Online censorship is no longer just the domain of authoritarian countries like China and Saudi Arabia. Today, even westernized countries like Australia and the United States are beginning to restrict access to web content. And countries like Canada and the United Kingdom are also enacting gag orders which prevent publishers from discussing certain topics.

This kind of censorship becomes especially important in today’s global business environment, where companies will often have employees spread out across many different countries. In order to ensure that they all have consisted access to corporate resources, their network traffic must be re-routed to a location that guarantees them the appropriate Internet access.

Imagine sending one of your sales reps to China for an important sales meeting, only to have them locked out of the CRM system because of their location!

Easier Access To Hacking Tools

Today, it’s extremely easy for teenagers with virtually no network security experience to perform sophisticated hacking attacks. Today’s hacking tools are designed to be simple and easy-to-use, which is a major reason why we’re seeing so many new attacks by online vandals and political activists.

Anonymity

These days, everything you do online leaves a digital footprint about your past. And once you put something on the Internet, it’s very difficult to take it off. Many would say that removing content from the web is like trying to remove milk from your coffee.

By routing your traffic through an alternate path, you add an extra layer of your protection to your anonymity. This will become even more important as sites like Google and Facebook become even smarter when it comes to sucking out every detail of your private life.

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Enduring Lighting Strikes and Service Outages in the Cloud

By Olafur Ingthorsson on August 21, 2011 in Cloud Computing and Cloud Security. 1 Comment

A guest article by Arjan de Jong, Marketing Manager at Jitscale

In early August, a lightning strike at a transformer owned by one of Amazon’s power suppliers caused a major failure in Amazon Web Services’ European cloud. The power outage affected, among others, the Elastic Compute Cloud (ECS) and Rational Database Service (RDS) cloud services.

According to the Amazon Web Services status page, a transformer from an energy supplier for one of the availability zones (EU-WEST-1 region) in Dublin was struck by lightning. An availability zone is a set of hardware that supports cloud services and that functions independently of other zones. According to the site, the cloud services were weakened by the impact. Since the cloud services are composed of complex software components, Amazon had to assign more hardware to restore its cloud services after the power had been restored.

Courtesy of Brilhasti1 (Flickr)

This is the type of event that causes some businesses to doubt the benefits of cloud computing and to believe that it is not a safe or reliable method of hosting data. While these doubts are understandable, the fact is there are a variety of techniques a cloud computing company can apply to mitigate disruption caused by weather events and resulting power outages.

One option, depending on a client’s business requirements, is for the cloud provider to distribute its servers over multiple availability zones (AZ). This redundancy provides excellent protection from localized emergencies such as a lightning strike, power surge or other severe weather related events.

For other customers, monitoring and frequent back ups can mitigate problems when incidents occur. With careful monitoring, engineers will be informed immediately when servers are unreachable. Then, using snapshots of all servers taken on an hourly basis, it is possible to boot the relevant servers in AZ’s that are available.

Several physical redundancies can also help to mitigate problems. These include redundant power supplies and backup generators that are tested to assure they will kick on when the power fails-unlike Amazon’s generators in Dublin. Using redundant Internet connections running simultaneously provides a backup if one provider fails or is performing poorly. Redundant hardware, such as multiple hard drives and other components, can be arranged so that if one fails, another immediately and seamlessly take its place.

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The growth of cloud computing in India

By Olafur Ingthorsson on August 1, 2011 in Cloud Computing and Cloud Security. 1 Comment

As many of my blog visitors come from India, I thought it was interesting to put together a short post about the status of cloud computing in India. It is a common consensus that India will play a important role in the growth of cloud computing in the coming years. This is not at all surprising as the cloud will enable much more companies, not least SMEs, to enter the market quicker and more easily as well as benefit economically. And few countries, if any, are producing more SMEs than India, including IT and technology companies, although several challenges still exist – like lack of Internet access and stable electricity in some areas.

Courtesy of Rachel in Wonderland (Flickr)

Cloud computing growing fast in India

According to IDC, India is facing an information explosion with digital data growing from 40.000 petabytes in 2010 to 2.3-million petabytes in 2020 – with the cloud in the middle as Indian companies look for leveraging cost advantages.

As a testament to this development, several research analysts have published predictions on the cloud growth in India:

According to a Gartner survey, Indian companies expect to adopt new cloud services in 2011 much faster than originally anticipated, with two-thirds of CIOs expecting the majority of IT to be running in the cloud within the next four years.

In earlier news, IDC reported that the Indian cloud computing market would grow at a CAGR of 40 percent by 2014, and to become a $3 billion dollar market by 2015.

A study for EMC, conducted by Zinnov Management Consulting, finds that private cloud in India will deliver up to 50% saving to Indian enterprises creating in the process 100,000 additional jobs by 2015.

Furthermore, the CEO of Zinnov claims that cloud computing will reshape the Indian IT market by generating new opportunities for IT vendors and driving changes in traditional IT offerings.

Cloud providers are preparing
However, not only research analysts are forecasting an impressive future for cloud computing in India, several large US companies like Google and Symantec are already taking aggressive steps in leveraging the Indian market. Few big names which recently joined the Google cloud are Indian Youth Congress, Indiamart and Punj Lloyd - a large engineering and design company.
Likewise, Symantec expects that within a year cloud computing will be blooming in India, although many Indian executives have listed concerns over security issues in the cloud. To address this concern, Symantec is interested in providing cloud-based security solutions specifically targeted at Indian businesses.
It is going to be very interesting to monitor the growth of cloud computing in India in the coming months and years. Undoubtedly, will both hear of a number of US companies making large investments in the Indian market as well as seeing some Indian firms become powerful global cloud providers.

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Users happy with UK cloud providers

By Olafur Ingthorsson on July 25, 2011 in Cloud Computing and Cloud Security. 0 Comments

According to a new survey from the Cloud Industry Forum of 450 organizations in the UK, almost half (48 percent) are already using cloud computing in some shape or form.

The survey showed high levels of satisfaction with cloud service providers, but lingering confusion about business interruption issues and the consequences of downtime.

Courtesy of Edwård (Flickr)

The Cloud Becomes Mainstream

The survey suggests that cloud services are no longer a buzzword, but already in widespread practice. Not surprisingly, the private sector is leading the way, with far higher uptake of cloud services than seen with their public sector counterparts. Medium to large companies are at the forefront of cloud adoption, as opposed to the small businesses with less than 20 employees or the public sector.

The survey findings also show that the decision to migrate to the cloud is now predominantly made by the head of IT, rather than CEOs or managing directors (MDs). In smaller companies without IT departments, the decision is mostly taken by the MD or owner.

Cloud services are maturing

An overwhelming majority of respondents (94 percent) is satisfied with the use of cloud services and happy with the results of their use of the cloud. This definitely indicates that the market is maturing and service providers are successfully offering cloud services that are meeting customer expectations. Only a few mid- to large-scale enterprises mentioned difficulties with the migration to the cloud, which should not come as a surprise.

Increasing cloud adoption rates

Similarly, the majority of respondents expect their use of cloud services to increase significantly in the next 12 months, especially with email services, data back-up and data storage services. Also, one-third of those not currently employing cloud services claimed that they anticipated adopting them in the next year, and almost two-thirds believe that their companies will eventually employ cloud services.

Data security and location

Not surprisingly, many respondents claim that they are reluctant to move sensitive data to the cloud, especially employee information, account/financial data. Data security and data privacy were cited as the number one concern.

Also, the physical location of data and jurisdiction was another area of concern for cloud users, preferring to have the data stored in the UK or EU. This development is interesting as it reflects natural concerns driven by regulation and that national law provides a higher level of comfort to cloud users. Enterprise users clearly want to know where their data is stored in the cloud at all times and be aware of the legislation of the particular jurisdiction where the data resides.

However, as a sign of immaturity of the cloud market, only about half of respondents employing cloud services negotiated the legal terms of their contract with their cloud service provider (CSP), with larger organizations more likely to do so. Furthermore, the study reveals that users are in the dark over questions of liability, indemnity, insurance and ownership of content in the cloud. Some uncertainty also exists about the issue of business continuity and risk management. Forty-three percent claimed that their insurance covered business interruption from a disaster at the CSP’s data center or a data leak. Two-thirds believed this should be covered by the CSP – indicating an uncertainty of responsibility and accountability. Certainly this reflects the importance of establishing a wider insurance industry and best practices guidelines.

Flexibility is the primary driver

When it comes to the primary driver of cloud adoption the overwhelming reason is flexibility, according to 53 percent of respondents. Interestingly, cost savings were cited by only 16 percent as the primary driver for initial cloud adoption – a contradiction with the emphasis that cloud service providers have put on cost savings as the primary selling proposition. It seems that the cloud is affording businesses large and small, public and private, the flexibility they need to adapt to the ever changing business environment.

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Cloud Computing and QoS Compatibility for Business Video Conferencing

By Olafur Ingthorsson on July 21, 2011 in Cloud Computing. 2 Comments

A guest article by Allen Drennan, CTO, Founder and Chairman, Nefsis.com

The widespread adoption of cloud computing in business-critical applications such as storage and CRM has set the stage for conquering another, video conferencing cloud computing offers compelling, fundamental advantages in this product category: lower cost, automated fail-over, and much easier to scale versus video-specific routers, multipoint control units (MCUs) and other infrastructure hardware solutions.  But as experienced IT managers know, there’s more to video conferencing than meets the eye, literally.  What about bandwidth consumption and manageability?

From Santorini Greece (click for url)

In recent announcements Nefsis highlighted the advantages of its cloud-based delivery platform with respect to bandwidth efficiency and manageability, too.  In summary, Nefsis uses a combination of 1) dynamic video scaling, i.e., adjusting video quality and bandwidth consumption in real-time, on a per-connection basis; 2) QoS mechanisms; and 3) built-in diagnostic tools to provide a complete IT toolkit for efficiently using, managing and capping bandwidth consumption.

The QoS mechanisms allow IT staff in QoS-enabled environments to assign different traffic priorities or performance levels to the Nefsis video conferencing application and its users.

These video conferencing QoS mechanisms include:

  • Tagging data packets so traffic is managed on QoS-enabled network segments
  • Compatibility with QoS policy controls that reserve resources
  • Negotiating a network connection to determine if adequate bandwidth is available, receiving admission and adapting bandwidth consumption as required
  • Lowering bandwidth consumption  – on  a per connection basis – if network conditions degrade via Nefsis’ dynamic video scaling

Nefsis cloud-based video conferencing features and these detailed bandwidth management tools provide IT staff a complete, business-grade video conferencing solution that can easily be tested and deployed throughout their organization.

Cloud-Based Video Conferencing Benefits Network Users and IT Staff

In a typical video conferencing application, first the feature-functional requirements must be met for its intended users. Then, IT staff concerns regarding security, desktop reach (aka firewall and proxy traversal), and bandwidth manageability must be addressed.

A good business-grade video conferencing solution pick-ups where consumer online services fall off, adding security, multipoint HD video, advanced collaboration tools, and firewall and proxy traversal as needed to support both desktops and conference rooms.

Nefsis cloud computing and multi-core, parallel processing technology easily handles these communications and processor-intensive tasks.  With Nefsis, you can even play an HD media file, such as a training movie, and discuss it during your video conference.

And, with the latest tools mentioned above – dynamic video scaling, built-in diagnostics, and QoS compatibility – Nefsis video conferencing addresses IT staff concerns regarding bandwidth consumption and manageability.

Now, it’s easy to start small.  Business-grade video conferencing can easily be accomplished over most existing networks, with no major investment in infrastructure hardware or bandwidth expansion.  This benefits small-to-medium sized businesses by dramatically reducing the financial risk of video conferencing, while providing distributed enterprise networks an easy way to scale video conferencing as needed.

Moving Video Conferencing to the Cloud 

While this article focused on QoS and related tools for managing bandwidth, it’s important to note that these capabilities are in addition to the fundamental advantages of moving video conferencing to the cloud: load balancing, automated fail-over, and scalability versus previous generations of infrastructure solutions.

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Improving the Mobile Cloud

By Olafur Ingthorsson on July 18, 2011 in Cloud Computing and Mobile Cloud Computing. 1 Comment

Although most agree that mobile cloud computing holds a great promise for delivering cloud solutions to individuals and even critical corporate applications to employees by enabling access from anywhere, there are still several barriers that need to be addressed to elevate its usefulness and capabilities. For mobile cloud computing to reach its full potential, the following three critical challenges need to be addressed, as detailed in a recent article by Bryan Betts:

  • Lowering network latency to meet application and code offload interactivity
  • Increasing network bandwidth for faster data transfer between the cloud and devices
  • Providing adaptive monitoring of network conditions to optimize network and device costs against the user’s perceived performance of cloud applications

(Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/vizzzual-dot-com/2476109235)

None of these are easy to accomplish, but service and network providers are already making important steps to improve the mobile cloud experience.

Overcoming latency limitations

Latency increases with distance, and the number of network nodes that the data needs to pass. As a result, moving  applications as close to the user as possible decreases latency effects. There are examples of providers taking steps to address this. Ericsson, for example, made a strategic partnership with Akamaiearlier this year which will enable service providers that run on Ericsson infrastructure to route internet traffic intelligently based on user location and add caching capabilities to a mobile network. This technology is expected to increase user experience and advance mobile e-commerce and banking. Dynamically moving the data towards the mobile user is clearly the best way to minimize latency issues and save bandwidth.

Improving bandwidth utilization

More and more mobile service providers have started offering 4G/LTE mobile services within restricted areas. One of the greatest advantages of LTE is capacity. Each LTE cell supports up to four times the data and voice capacity when compared to HSPA (UMTS High-Speed-Packet-Access). Other advantages include low latency, plug and play, and support for both frequency division multiplexing (FDD) and time division duplexing (TDD) in the same platform.  In theory, LTE is capable of downlink peak rates of 100 Mbps and an uplink of at least 50 Mbps. Similar to GSM and UMTS, LTE operates at different frequency bands and can be deployed in clear spectrum with bandwidth as wide as 20 MHz of paired spectrum (20 MHz Uplink, 20 MHz Downlink).

Dynamic Network Monitoring

Several new technologies promise a more intelligent deployment of network resources and may minimize latency. For example, HTML5 offers data caching , allowing users to experience fewer problems due to intermittent network performance or network congestion. When it comes to the mobile cloud, network performance management becomes increasingly important. Better mobile network monitoring systems enable dynamic traffic re-routing and swapping, or handover, between cells based on traffic load patterns and user location.

All these will help to improve the mobile cloud user experience and make it more viable for corporations that are interested in providing mobile access to many of their core applications.

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Flexibility primary benefit of migrating to the cloud

By Olafur Ingthorsson on July 14, 2011 in Cloud Computing. 0 Comments

A guest article by Arjan de Jong, Jitscale

July 14, 2011 – Cloud providers have primarily focused on cost savings when they try to persuade companies to migrate to the cloud, but businesses indicate that agility to deliver new services is their primary driver to adopt cloud computing. This is according to a recent study conducted by the Cloud Industry Forum in the UK (www.cloudindustryforum.org). Companies are moving to the cloud because it offers them the flexibility they need to adapt to the ever changing business climate. The cloud makes it possible to access technology quickly and to offer solutions that they did not already have.

Cloud computing market maturing

According to the survey, an overwhelming majority of companies already on the cloud are satisfied with their current use of cloud services. This indicates that the cloud computing market is maturing and businesses are harvesting the benefits they sought.

When these same cloud computing users were asked what additional activities they would likely move to the cloud, data backup/disaster recovery, email services, and data storage services were on the top of the list. On the other hand, the vast majority of companies surveyed do not intend to move employee information and accounts or financial data services to the cloud in the foreseeable future.

Some concerns remain

This last response demonstrates that even though the general trend of cloud computing is positive, some concerns still remain. Data security, data privacy and physical location of data were mentioned as major worries by companies responding to the survey. Regarding the location of data, companies felt more confident if data was stored locally or nationally as they were concerned about the potential impact of another country’s laws on data storage.

Untapped markets exist

Within the IT Channel, cloud services are increasingly considered important, according to resellers surveyed. A large majority of resellers believe end users are ready to move to the cloud and the resellers are active in selling and supporting cloud services. There is still room for growth in this market, however, as almost one third of the resellers still do not actively engage with their customers about the relevance of cloud services versus on-premises technology.

Decision taken by head of IT

The survey also shows that in larger companies the decision to adopt cloud computing is now predominantly made by the head of IT, instead of the president, CEO or other management executive. In companies with fewer than 20 employees, however, the decision to migrate to the cloud is typically made by the president or owner.

Cloud computing gaining momentum

In closing, cloud computing is gaining momentum fast in organizations of all types and sizes. There are major opportunities for expanding the cloud market alongside on-premise solutions, by encouraging companies to adopt cloud computing and guaranteeing safe storage of even more data and IT functionality into the cloud.

Nimsoft Expands Cisco UCS Monitoring

By Olafur Ingthorsson on July 12, 2011 in Cloud Computing. 0 Comments

LAS VEGAS, Nev. – July 11, 2011– Today at Cisco Live, Cisco’s annual IT and communications conference, Nimsoft announced Nimsoft Monitor now features expanded coverage and additional advanced capabilities for use with Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) to provide customers with in-depth details of their cloud and data center platforms.

The Cisco Unified Computing System is the first fabric computing platform that combines industry-standard, x86 compute resources with networking and storage access to form a single converged system. Cisco UCS is designed for dynamic, scalable, and highly virtualized data centers and cloud environments. Nimsoft Monitor runs on Cisco UCS and monitors its components within a single, common platform with customers’ other cloud and traditional IT resources―including network, software switches, storage, databases, virtualization, and Web applications.


(credit: http://news.m3n4.com/photos/2011/vincent-van-gogh)

Nimsoft Monitor integrates with Cisco UCS and can automatically discover changes in physical Cisco UCS components (such as the chassis, fans, power supplies, and servers), as well as virtual resources and service profiles within Cisco UCS environments.  Once physical, virtual, and services resources have been discovered, Nimsoft Monitor can apply user-defined automated monitoring policies that are in synch with Cisco UCS threshold policies to provide customers with full visibility into the end-to-end health of their environments.

Enhancements to Nimsoft Monitor include:

  • Broadened component support: Nimsoft Monitor now offers support for Cisco UCS C-Series Rack-Mount Servers and Cisco UCS 2100 Series Fabric Extenders. This expanded coverage augments the solution’s support for other core components within Cisco UCS environments, including Cisco UCS chassis, server blade systems, and fabric interconnects.
  • Extended metric support: Nimsoft Monitor now gathers more metrics for interface cards within the blade server chassis. It supports monitoring of storage controllers, disks, Logical Unit Numbers (LUNs) and RAID batteries attached to server blades―and can now track available aggregated bandwidth by port type within fabric interconnects.
  • Easier configuration: Nimsoft Monitor now enables administrators to quickly select multiple thresholds for monitoring component states and supporting elastic Cisco UCS configurations.

“Pre-integrated, comprehensive infrastructure solutions like Cisco UCS represent a strategic, long-term option for enterprises and services providers looking to optimize the value, performance, and flexibility they get from their IT spend,” said Chris O’Malley, Nimsoft CEO. “Nimsoft Monitor uniquely enables customers to realize maximum benefits from their Cisco UCS investments by making it easy to maintain full visibility into both the Cisco UCS environment and the broader enterprise.”

Extended Support for Vblock™ Environments

Nimsoft Monitor also offers comprehensive, integrated monitoring coverage of the Vblock™ Infrastructure Platform, tracking physical, virtual, and application elements of Vblock environments including Vblock Series 300 and Vblock Series 700.

“Comprehensive, robust monitoring capabilities are a critical factor to realizing optimal performance and business value from Vblock Infrastructure Platforms in the long term,” said Tony Conway, Vice President Services, MTI Europe. “We’ve chosen Nimsoft Monitor as a basis for our MTI Care Managed Services portfolio because these capabilities are so critical, both to our company and our clients. By enhancing the solution’s coverage with vendors such as EMC and the Cisco UCS environments, Nimsoft extends the advantages Nimsoft Monitor delivers.”

To learn more, visit Nimsoft (Booth #2071) at Cisco Live.

 

Opening for business: Your new cloud?

By Olafur Ingthorsson on July 4, 2011 in Cloud Computing. 0 Comments

A guest article by Ditlev Bredahl, CEO, OnApp

Cloud computing is high on the agenda for all UK businesses, particularly for companies with substantial IT infrastructure – hosting providers, and large enterprises.  Whether its building a private cloud for internal users, or a public cloud on which to host paying customers, the first challenge is finding the best way to “cloud-enable” that IT infrastructure.

While some companies build their own clouds from scratch, the quickest path to the cloud, for most, is to invest in a third party cloud deployment and management tool. There are many available, and this is a guide to the ten tips a would-be cloud businesses should consider when choosing the right tool to help build and manage their cloud.

1. Fundamentals

When choosing a hosting provider make sure you choose a provider with real understanding and experience of what businesses need to successfully deploy a public or private cloud.

2. True cloud, not just virtualisation

Insist on functionality that gives you maximum automation and efficiency. Above all, find a product that gives you the flexibility to adapt to the market as it evolves.

3. Time to “cloud-readiness”

Remember a lengthy cloud deployment increases the risk of late entry into the public cloud hosting market where early adopters have become established leaders. For enterprises, slow cloud transition risks both the need for fresh capital expenditure on new hardware and operational inefficiency of the existing infrastructure. Measure your deployment in days, not months.

4. Cost

Every planned transition to cloud computing will be carefully scrutinised in terms of cost. Launching a public cloud business for hosts requires complete transparency from your cloud software provider. The cloud management software market is increasingly competitive, and best-in-class functionality can be yours for little or no up-front investment. You need to have a very good reason to insist on software with monolithic licensing and prices for integration, implementation and support.

5. Billing

Don’t assume that moving to the cloud means you have to adopt new billing platforms, utility billing models and a small set of billing options. Billing flexibility will be critical to the success of your cloud project.

6. Hardware compatibility

Compatibility in server and storage hardware is a critical success factor for cloud projects. Focus on platforms that support the widest range of hardware types and performance levels; that enable you to re-use your existing servers and SANs; and providers that can help with any hardware investment you need to make.

7. IOPS monitoring

Unless you have good reason, avoid cloud management systems that cannot monitor IOPS or that don’t offer flexible tiered storage and swap disks.

8. User permissions

Look for cloud software that gives you granular control of user limits and permissions, with an API that lets you exploit that control to create exactly the cloud service your customers need.

9. Usability

Focus on the UI from an internal as well as a customers’ viewpoint, and favour cloud platforms that enable you to customise the user experience easily – either directly, or through the API.

10. Support

Since this is the platform on which you’re running your cloud business, insist on free, high quality, 24×7 support from your cloud software provider.

 

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View on cloud computing strategy

By Olafur Ingthorsson on June 27, 2011 in Cloud Computing and Hybrid cloud computing. 1 Comment

According to a new IDG Research study, IT decision makers in Europe see business agility as providing the greatest impetus to adopt cloud computing. Of the more than 600 IT managers surveyed, more than 90 percent agree that the cloud provides a way to access the on-demand, self-managed virtual infrastructure, consumed as a service. Sixty percent say they will redeploy company application and hardware/equipment budgets to help pay for cloud projects.

Enterprise hybrid clouds

According to the study, there are signs that private and public cloud models are giving way to the enterprise hybrid cloud. Public clouds lack the proven business-scale technologies and security controls and private clouds have limited scalability potential and sometimes miss obtaining satisfactory utilization levels. Advantages of enterprise hybrid clouds are numerous including offloading between private and public clouds, guaranteed resource allocation, control dashboard for managing resources across internal and external environments and enterprise-class security levels.

European perspective

European IT leaders value agility as the primary motivation for cloud computing. Seventy-one percent of European CIOs at large organizations say agility tops their agendas, while only 44 percent point to reducing the IT infrastructure investment. This is particularly evident among U.K. and French IT leaders that currently are in the process of re-architecting infrastructure resources into hybrid cloud environments.

Courtesy of Palbo (flickr) - http://www.flickriver.com/photos/parb/4650123593/

Globally, security concerns are the number one challenge or barriers for cloud deployment. Over 90 percent of CIOs in Germany and France claim they are much more likely to use cloud computing if security could be guaranteed to be the same or better than in their internal data centers. Fifty-six percent of European CIOs rank cloud security as extremely or very challenging. Other management issues like recovery, performance and compliance are also high on the agenda.

To address many of the critical issues of concern, respondents acknowledge the importance of investing not just in technology but in their IT team’s education and training. Sixty-five percent of respondents say that successful cloud deployments require in-house skills to be fostered and roles created to ensure company-wide adoption.

Cloud business case

Interestingly, it seems that European IT leaders have a generally positive view of current vendors’ abilities to meet a number of key requirements would help them fulfill a number of the promises of their business cases. The majority is pleased with open standards an open source capabilities as well as vendors’ business-level quality of service and business-level security. German CIOs tend to have the most positive opinion of vendors of the respondents.

Increasing Strategic Importance

The study reveals that not only is cloud adoption expanding rapidly, but also growing in strategic importance. Eighty-seven percent of the European respondents say that cloud computing is either a critical, high or moderate priority for their organizations over the next 18 months. With the increasing emphasis of performance, business-level security and quality of service for deploying mission-critical applications in the cloud, the strategic importance is greatly increasing. Perhaps the enterprise hybrid cloud not only paves the way to a more strategic organization, but also provides a great promise to enterprises seeking to deploy cloud computing.

More Trends in the Fast-Growing Mobile Apps Market

By Olafur Ingthorsson on June 14, 2011 in Cloud Computing. 0 Comments

According to a new Nielsen report, already one in four US adults have smartphones that are more powerful than the computers initially used to send men to the moon. Nielsen predicts that by the end of 2011, the majority of mobile subscribers in the US will have smartphones. What may that mean for mobile apps? Let’s take a look at some data on recent trends.

Mobile Apps

Since 2009, the Nielsen Company has issued an annual survey called the Mobile Apps Playbook, monitoring and providing information about the mobile app ecosystem. According to the latest survey, games continue to be the most popular category of apps for both smartphones and feature phones.

Not surprisingly, Facebook tops the list of the most popular apps on all smartphone operating systems. Other popular apps include Twitter, the Weather Channel, Google Maps and Pandora music service. No surprises there. Most applications are found through searching and through recommendation from friends and family members. Ratings and reviews are important when it comes to deciding which apps are downloaded.

Interestingly, Apple App Store users tend to download nearly twice as many apps as those who download Android or Blackberry apps and iPhone users are more willing to pay for apps. Furthermore, iPhone users claim that they are willing to pay for one in three apps they download in general, while Android and Blackberry users are less willing to pay for apps. Perhaps some of the reason has to do with how early Apple started charging for applications – making users accustomed to the paid apps model.

Mobile ads

When it comes to advertising, younger users are more receptive, with 58 percent saying that they “always” or “sometimes look at ads.” According to the report, men are more receptive to mobile ads than women. Users prefer to view mobile ads within an app rather than on the outside or when searching. However, those who viewed a mobile ad most often took the action of using a search engine to find out more information. Only eight-percent purchased advertised product/service immediately.

Connected devices

When it comes to mobile devices beyond cellphones, the iPod Touch currently sees the most app downloads, followed by Sony PSP and Apple iPad. The Nielsen report concludes that app download will increase enormously for all kinds of connected devices in mobile media.

Some of the interesting conclusion from the report include the preference of Android users for free apps. One of the reasons could be a younger and less affluent user segment compared to iPhone users. This segment is more likely to click an ad within an app, which spells a clear monetization opportunity for mobile advertisers.

Moreover, Blackberry users lag behind both iPhone and Android users when it comes to app download, even with the newer Blackberry Curve and Bold. This probably has to do with limited selection in the Blackberry App World compared to Apple App Store and Android Market.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, apps are still a very young market and leaders of today may become the laggards of tomorrow. Therefore, there remains plenty of room for new innovative apps. Some of the new app categories to follow include augmented reality and various mash-ups.

 

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